How Do You Say '500 Billion Dollars' In Spanish?

     Mexico gets no respect around here. People in this country seem to have the lowest levels of tolerance towards people of Hispanic descent I've ever heard of, classifying all of them as Mexicans. Studying for Spanish tests, I have had people come up to me and tell me to "stop speaking Mexican". And of course we have armadas of digital talking heads blaming Mexico for the US unemployment rate with the traditional "they're stealing our jobs" rhetoric.

     Leaving aside the fact that this is overt racism, hasn't anyone noticed that it's not true?

     Mexico is a huge economic help for the US. Trade with Mexico in 2011 totaled over half a trillion dollars, split only slightly unequally between imports and exports (ustr.gov). Have you heard of NAFTA? There's a reason that the North American Free Trade Agreement exists! (If anything, we stole their jobs on that one, when cheap corn from America put small farmers all over Mexico out of business. Leading in turn to them trying to come north for work - we created our own immigration problem.) President Obama himself has remarked on Mexico's bad rap: "Sometimes I think we forget this is a massive trading partner responsible for huge amounts of commerce and huge numbers of jobs" (nytimes.com).

The text on this Mexican peso translates to "United States of Mexico".
Just another example, albeit a poetic one, of the links between our countries.

     Do people not recognize how much Mexico helps us? I don't like to think that, since the people are the ones who control which direction this country goes in, but I suppose it's possible. It's the nature of the world that successes are thankless and failures get you only blame. Chalk one up in favor of the thickheaded / ignorant / uninformed hypothesis. On the other hand, plenty of anti-Mexico-ites are, other than that, intelligent and informed. So am I missing something here? Some reason for all the odio? Some factor that makes the public judgmental and biased? Something that Mexico actually did to us? Or am I going off on a tangent, and this isn't the big issue that it seems like to me? Let's hear the opinion of the people about the opinion of the people.